The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

Saturday, July 4, 2015

where (by using Google translate) we can read about
the June 2015 international midwives conference in St. Peterburg, which drew
participants from the U.S., Ukraine, Russia, and other countries. This article
uses the term doula in what appears
to be a broader way than is usual in the U.S., where a doula is usually a “birth companion” who attends and comforts the laboring
mother rather than actively focusing on the baby. We also tend to use “midwife”
to describe a person trained to work with the delivery and the baby, but
without the medical training of an obstetrician or a neonatologist. The Google
translation as I read it seems to mix the vocabulary describing these
functions.

As many readers will know, a rebound from the
intense medicalization of childbirth as it took place before World War II was
underway in the 1950s and increased greatly in the 1970s in the U.S. Resistance
to medicalization caused some real changes, including the presence of fathers
or other relatives in delivery rooms and the establishment of birthing centers
that had medical services but a relaxed atmosphere where a family’s older
children would be welcome. This movement, added to insurance coverage changes,
led to shorter hospital stays for healthy mothers and babies. The motivation of
medical facilities to please birthing families also began not only to allow fathers or grandmothers to
be present with the laboring mother, but to permit a doula who might be a friend or relation (but who might also be
hired by the family) to stay with the mother and give her the help that nurses
rarely have time for.

Those of us who gave labored in isolation and gave birth
while attendants shouted at us in the “old days” can appreciate the changes
that have been made, and appreciate the idea of a nurturing, supportive environment
during labor. Because being alone during labor is frightening for most women,
having a relative or a hired companion with us seems like a wonderful idea.
This swing of the pendulum to an older, less medicalized has many advantages.

BUT!

Regrettably, whatever may be the attitudes of individual
doulas or midwives, organizations of these persons have
a strong tendency to pursue the opposite pole from mechanistic,
objectively-evaluated medical practices. Rather than simply humanizing some
unnecessarily problematic medical approaches to childbirth, and reaching some
sensible central position, the organizations have often gone far from center
toward New Age beliefs and practices that stress subjectivity and the
supernatural. This tendency is seen in the material at the link given above. For
example, one recommendation has been to keep a large pyramid over the mother’s
head during labor and delivery—an idea that seems directly related to Wilhelm
Reich’s “orgone box” which was claimed to keep life energies from dissipating.
Similarly, it was suggested that the umbilical cord and placenta should be left
attached to the baby for several days after the birth, in order to “drain” back
into the child all the beneficial substances that had been taken in during
gestation.

The article on the St. Petersburg conference is
difficult to follow because of some of the vagaries of Google translate, so I
took the opportunity to look at web sites of some U.S.participants. For
example, Gail Tully at www.spinningbabies.com
mentions a number of ideas that involve rituals of sympathetic magic and
shamanistic approaches-- for example,
visualizing the unborn baby moving into an ideal position for birth, in order
to create this desired outcome. This web site makes clear the connections
between organizations of midwives and doulas
and the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH).

APPPAH members promulgate a variety of beliefs about
embryonic and fetal life that fail to be congruent with what is known about
prenatal development or with basic assumptions of developmental studies, such
as the connection between consciousness or memory and considerable advancement of
nervous system maturation. APPPAH
members have claimed that the unborn human being is aware of external events
from the time of conception or even before (some suggesting that each human
being has memories of life in sperm form and life in ovum form). These views
are quite similar to those stated by L. Ron Hubbard in Dianetics and repeated in other Scientological discussion. APPPAH
has also supported and repeated the views of Lloyd DeMause, the “psychohistorian”,
about the psychological pain and suffering of the fetus before and during
birth, and how this trauma marks each personality and distorts its development.

Not to put too fine a point on it, when I see APPPAH
links, I understand that any systematic evaluation of treatment outcomes has
been abandoned by the linker. It appears to me that except for the rare
individual doula or midwife, these
entire professions have been contaminated by an APPPAH-like perspective on
reality that abandons all scientific knowledge about prenatal life and
development. In addition, the commercialization of these fields has moved them
from shamanism right on to sham.

What was gained by past efforts to give families
more healthy choices about the conduct of childbirth has unfortunately come to
offer a choice between the simply outre’ and the outrageous and dangerous. The
New Thought period has been over for many decades. It’s time for reasonable people
to stand up and say we want potentially harmful alternative practices to be
regulated.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Quite some time ago, I posted here some comments
about the claims made by the California MFT Nancy Verrier, to the effect that
all adopted children, even those adopted on the day of birth, suffer from a “primal
wound” caused by the disruption of the prenatal attachment to the mother, and experience
life-long misery as a result. This belief is not congruent with anything we
know about the responses of young infants to separation from familiar
caregivers, nor with established information about the development of
attachment. I wrote an open letter asking Nancy Verrier to explain her position
and say why it should be considered plausible (http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2011/08/open-letter-to-Nancy-Verrier.html
). Verrier did not reply, unsurprisingly, but periodically I receive vituperative
comments from her followers.

I recently received one of these privately rather
than as a blog comment. The writer, whose name I will not mention because she
did not apparently intend to make her remarks public, started thus: “As
an adopted person, a lawyer person, and a sensible person, I say this:- As long
as the law is the way it is the worst case scenario is possible thus accounting
for various responses but all under the rubric of the denial of our loss. What’s
your investment in denying that unprocessed grief can [emotionally disturb ] a
person…? And if you know [person’s name] you should recuse yourself from this
discussion. Thank you.”

This relatively mild, though not very coherent,
statement was followed by two others in which I was said to be “nasty nasty
nasty” and [person’s name] was vilified for having adopted two children of an
ethnicity different from her own.

I don’t think it will be useful to address the implied
ad feminam attack (“what’s your
investment…?”) as this is a common technique among proponents of alternative
treatments and belief systems—rather than discussing the evidence for their
viewpoint, they propose that the opponent has some pathological, malicious, or
greedy reason for taking a contradictory position. The proponents don’t seem to
see that this opens the possibility of questioning their own motives, but
perhaps they realize that most of us who oppose them would not waste our time
in that kind of discussion.

Let me just focus in on the primary point of the
message I have quoted, that somehow my remarks involve “denial of our loss”.
This is a frequent rejoinder from Verrier supporters, who accuse critics of claiming
that they, the supporters are not unhappy.

No one, including me, has ever said that adopted
individuals do not experience a sense of loss as they realize their own history.
All adoptions begin with a narrative of sadness, as their stories may involve
abandonment of mother and child by a biological father, poverty, the fear and
shame of a young girl, the death of one or both parents, civil war, etc., etc.
Although some adoptive families may experience undiluted joy and satisfaction
from bringing a new child into their home, many also have a history of their
own sadness because of infertility or even the deaths of children in the past. There
is plenty of sadness to go around, some of it like the sadness that may be
found in nonadoptive families, some of it characteristic of adoption. Whether
this narrative of sadness does or does not have a life-long impact on an
individual depends on factors like personality and resilience, a tendency to
depression or to bipolar disorders, a culture’s perspective on the adopted
individual (for example, native Hawaiian culture does not consider a person to
have any connection with the birth family that did not rear her), and of course
the family’s handling of the adoption as “secret” or otherwise.

Verrier’s claim, and the claim of the Association
for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH) group that supports her,
is that just as older children may suffer emotionally from separation from familiar
people, even the youngest infants experience rage and grief at separation from
a birth mother to whom they have developed a prenatal emotional attachment.
(Such a posited attachment is explained variously as having biological/genetic
causes or by prenatal telepathic communication.)

It is true that children between about 8 months and
2 1/2 years are likely to respond with deep depression and social withdrawal
when separated from familiar attachment figures. With sensitive, nurturing
care, over time they recover from this loss and form new attachments, but
without sensitive care, or if subjected to several such losses, they may be
handicapped in their emotional and social lives. Infants under perhaps 6 months
of age, however, do not show concern about separation or anxiety about the
approach of unfamiliar people. Their behavior does not include attachment
behavior like watching or trying to stay near familiar caregivers, or like depression,
feeding and sleeping difficulties, irritability, or apathy when separated abruptly
and for a long period. For these
reasons, it appears implausible that early-adopted children suffer from a “primal
wound” (as opposed to sadness and concern about their history) or that any
grief they feel can be attributed to the loss of the birth mother. (N.B. the
biological father is only rarely mentioned in these discussions, although
attachment to a father can be as strong as or even stronger than that to the
mother.)

The implication of the Verrier perspective and that
of my correspondent quoted earlier is that adoption is never an acceptable
solution to the problem of care for a child. This, I think, is a wrong
conclusion, given what is known about early emotional development. Certainly it
would be repugnant to buy a child from a poverty-stricken mother, when she
could be helped to care for her family, and I consider it highly reprehensible
for church groups to go to Ethiopia or elsewhere and take children from parents
who do not actually have a concept of adoption, but believe the children will
return to them. But these concerns are often irrelevant to the choices to be
made for infants born to very young or incompetent mothers, to mothers who are
very sick, or to mothers who are mentally ill, all of whom may lack social support
systems and adequate resources to care for a child. In those cases, the
narrative of sadness will be part of the child’s life whether or not he is
adopted, and in fact may be worse if he remains with the birth mother.

Incidentally, I have communicated with [person’s
name] mentioned earlier. Interestingly, she had no idea that the Verrier
position was known outside the pathology of my correspondent—an inadvertent
comment on the plausibility of that position.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.